


Out Among The Stars

by missema



Series: Big Damn Heroes [5]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Drabbles, F/M, Fic Collection, Fluff, Heartwarming, Post-Canon, Post-War, Prompt Fic, short fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-23
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 02:04:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13777389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missema/pseuds/missema
Summary: Short fic collection for Mass Effect (trilogy and Andromeda). Feel free to prompt me on tumblr for fills.





	1. A Kiss We Had To Wait For -- Mia/Zaeed

Shepard was in the hospital for a very long time after falling back down to earth. Even with all her Cerberus upgrades and fixes, she was in a bad way. Zaeed visited her every day after he knew she'd been found, even when she wasn't awake yet.

He sat with Mia, talked to her, begged, cried, pleaded, made deals with a God that surely didn't listen to him, and wished that she would wake up. Every time he left, he kissed her forehead, her hand, something just to let himself know that she was still there, warm and alive, beneath all of those tubes. Eventually his visits grew quiet, because he was running out of things to say, and his days doing recovery were growing longer and they were finding less and less each day. Soon, it would be time to start over.

They told him to read to Shepard, so he did. But there weren't a lot of books on his omni-tool before everything had gone tits up, and now it was hard to get anything that wasn't locally available. In desperation, he asked around, and found a few collections that people had downloaded and were sharing. 

Most of them were romances, a few adventures, technical manuals, shit like that. A dull-ass biography that made him fall asleep in the chair when he was reading it aloud. Zaeed deleted that one. It didn't deserve to be kept for posterity.

When Mia's eyes opened, he wasn't there, but they found him right away. They'd long since realized that he was her next of kin, the person that should be informed, that needed to know. Liara had begrudgingly backed up his claim when the makeshift hospital tried to keep him out. Asari always commanded more respect than humans, and Liara was a hero, Shepard's friend, not just some old, scarred merc that shot his way into a long life.

Her face was gaunt, almost hollow as she looked up at him from the hospital bed. She licked dry lips with a sandpaper tongue, and he gave her a glass of water. He held it, because her hands shook too much, taking it away when she waved at him. She gave him a warm smile that made her brown eyes twinkle. "I could hear you," she told him.

"Yeah?"

"Reading to me. Talking. I hope we get an end like those two turians," she said, giving him a smile.

Garrus had given him a copy of a turian love story about two soldiers that die saving a colony, after a night of passion. They went out in a blaze of fire, together, saving lives, but Zaeed shook his head at her.

"Nah, we did that, and we're both still here. We have to write our own ending, looks like."

"Zaeed," she said, suddenly serious. "I can't feel my legs. Are they gone?"

"One of them is," he told her, "just below the knee."

She nodded, taking it in. She'd been expecting worse, he could see it in her eyes. "You're the only one that talked to me like normal. It was nice to hear you, when I could. I wasn't really awake."

Shepard beckoned him closer and he came, bending his head close to her lips to hear her. "When are you going to take off your armor and get into bed with me?" she asked, making him wheeze with unexpected laughter. He turned his head and kissed her, not caring about the eighty machines hooked up to her. He'd been waiting for her to wake up, to be her, to know if his Mia was still in that battered skull.

She was still there, defying the odds again, and he kissed her so she'd know how much he appreciated the homecoming.


	2. Cookies -- Iladia Shepard/Steven Hackett

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt fic for fluffy/heartwarming between Shepard and Hackett

Shepard could smell cookies even before she really woke up from her nap. Actually it was the smell of cookies that made her edge towards wakefulness instead of lingering in bed as her tired body wanted her to do. Iladia woke up with a smile, wondering where on Earth her husband had gotten the ingredients for cookies. Literally, where on earth did they have everything that was needed?

Iladia hadn’t woken up to the smell of something baking in years, not since her parents had both been deployed and she’d been staying with her abuelita. The scent of slightly burned chocolate is what really roused her, and she pulled herself up to sitting so she could get into her wheelchair. Physical therapy that morning had been tough, but if she wanted her legs to heal properly, she had to endure it. Besides, it was really nothing compared to N7 training, although she’d been a willing participant in that. Not so much getting the shit beat out of her while trying to save the world and then crashing back down to it.

Miranda said she’d been more of a mess this time than she had been the first time they’d met, which was saying something. Getting put back together for a second time in just a few years was proving to be a challenge for everyone involved. But then again, no one had endless buckets of money like the Illusive Man seemed to have back then, and Iladia was awake and had to do her part to get better. It was tough, and with the shortages on earth, there were times when sleeping through her pain was just about all she could manage in a day.

But she was still alive, and no one was expecting her to get up and have any more victories now, so that was something. General Iladia Carmen Morales Shepard de Hackett (Ret.), only had to worry about getting better these days, and that was a Herculean task on its own. She got married, changed her name and tried to live a quiet life as a retired Alliane Marine. She didn’t go by General Hackett just to avoid confusion. There had been a few people that called her husband General Hackett during the Reaper War, not many, but enough that it could cause some headaches. Hackett wasn’t a true general in rank as she was, and it had taken an act by two governments and what remained of the Alliance brass to make her one, so she was proud of it. Proud as she was, she was still Shepard to most people, and Commander Shepard to fans that recognized her. Most of them didn’t these days.

Easing down the hall, Iladia chased the enticing aroma of baked goods until she found her husband, neatly making up what looked like his third batch of cookies. Two dozen uniformly round little chocolate chip cookies sat cooling on a wire rack on the counter and as she went by she took one of the warm cookies and bit into it. It was light, sweet and the chocolate still partially melted – in a word, it was perfect.

“Steven, what are you doing home?” she asked just as he leaned down to greet her with a kiss. When she’d gone to sleep, he hadn’t been there. He wasn’t, most of the time, but he still had a job while she didn’t.

“Wanted to see how you were, Ladi. You didn’t stop by after your appointment, but when I got here you were dead to the world, so I started cleaning up. That turned into cookies,” he explained, and smoothly put another tray of round lumps of cookie dough into the oven. “I had to trade to get some of this, but you said a few weeks back you missed dessert. It’s not a cake, but cookies are always a good start.”

“They are,” Iladia said, beaming up at him. “I didn’t know you could bake.”

“It’s just measuring,” he said, smiling at her. “Even I can manage that, most of the time.”

“Somehow, I don’t believe that. You know I can’t cook and if it was just measuring, that wouldn’t be the case.”

“I may have had some practice, in the past,” Hackett admitted with another grin. He leaned across the stovetop to hit the button to turn on the interior light, and then peered in at the cookies. “I had an aunt Mary, when I was a boy, who made all the birthday cakes. I remember them more than I can remember her, to be honest, but she always said cakes are the real test.”

“I look forward to seeing you meet that challenge, and eating the results,” Iladia said as she slid backwards to grab another cookie. Hackett gave her a mock frown, but she knew him well enough that she could see the smile at the edges of it.

“You skipped the part where you told me how therapy went today,” he said, reminding her of her grueling strength-building session.

Iladia groaned but started to answer as she poured herself a glass of water. “It was a lot. Trying to get my legs back into shape to hold me when I keep expanding isn’t an easy task.”

“Good thing cookies are nutritious,” he said, winking at her.

Iladia wondered if she vowed not to eat too many more, if it would do any good. Probably not, she decided and went for another one of the excellent cookies.


	3. Love At First Sight - Mia/Zaeed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sex trope bingo prompt
> 
> This ain't exactly love, but Mia Shepard isn't a lust at first sight kind of woman either.

He was beating the shit out of a batarian on Omega, and she felt a little stupid when her heart did a flutter as he turned around, but it did. He wasn’t a beautiful man in the way they are in the vids, suave men with just the right amount of stubble and smooth muscles. He was so far from that Mia Shepard could have laughed, but she never put much stock in the commercial idea of beauty anyway. It was hard enough to be a teenager on the streets, so her vanity had never really developed. She hadn’t the time to give two shits about beauty, didn’t have the chance to develop those warm, squishy feelings about others. Life was about survival and sex was a transaction at best.

This was a man that had survived, she could see it in his scars and they told the beginnings of a story that excited her.

Scared her too, because people who wanted to get close to her liked to do more than talk. She wasn’t much of a toucher, not the way other people were. Her body was her space, and hers alone. People got in close to inflict more damage, not less. Shepard didn’t do _close_.

It was really a shame, because she saw interest flare in his mismatched eyes. Interest and more than a little hostility mingled in his gaze, but she couldn’t fault him for that; she didn’t trust people that showed up knowing her name for no reason, and he wisely didn’t either. She sounded like a cop saying “Zaeed Massani”, calling out his whole name in the middle of Omega. Military training was hard to shake, even if she wasn’t technically Alliance anymore. It was a pity though that he was so strangely charismatic, because they were probably going to die.

She’d already died once, might as well make it twice. If her luck held, she might even get a third time.


End file.
